French Poets and Novelists - Summary and Themes

Summary and Themes

This was James' first book of literary criticism, and it's no surprise he made it a collection of essays about French writers (and Turgenev). As a child he had visited France for long periods with his family, and he had lived in Paris for about a year before moving permananetly to England in 1876. Thoroughly familiar with the language and personally acquainted with many French writers, James could offer insight into the country's literature that few Americans of his time (or any time) could match.

James' familiarity with French literature hardly meant that he approved of everything the country produced. He ripped into Baudelaire's Fleurs du Mal for what he thought was a puerile conception of evil: "...evil for him begins outside and not inside, and consists primarily of a great deal of lurid landscape...an affair of blood and carrion and physical sickness—there must be stinking corpses and starving prostitutes and empty laudanum bottles in order that the poet shall be effectively inspired...Our impatience is of the same order as that which we should feel if a poet, pretending to pluck 'the flowers of good,' should come and present us, as specimens, a rhapsody on plumcake and eau de Cologne."

This was indicative of how James would portray evil in his own fiction, as a "thing at its source, deep in the human consciousness." In his essay on Turgenev, James proclaimed in stirring tones his own conception of reality and how the novelist had to face it: "Life is, in fact, a battle. On this point optimists and pessimists agree. Evil is insolent and strong; beauty enchanting but rare; goodness very apt to be weak; wickedness to carry the day; imbeciles to be in great places, people of sense in small, and mankind generally unhappy. But the world as it stands is no illusion, no phantasm, no evil dream of a night; we wake up to it again for ever and ever; we can neither forget it nor deny it nor dispense with it." James would often portray his sensitive protagonists ground down and defeated by treacherous but inescapable life.

The book also offered two long, instructive essays on the novelist James would always regard as his most important guide and mentor, Balzac: "He believed that he was about as creative as the Deity, and that if mankind and human history were swept away the Comédie Humaine would be a perfectly adequate substitute for them." James wouldn't make such grandiose claims for his own fiction, but he always tried to make his novels and tales into equally precise and comprehensive documents on human nature.